Author: emshortif

More comp reactions, while we wait for results…

On the intfiction forum, a few of the authors have posted comments now that Rule 5 no longer applies.

Some new review sets have been posted (see my roundup entry for the ones I know about so far — everything after Auntie Pixelante’s blog is fresh material from the last day or so).

Alabaster Interim Status Report (Release 18)

I am still working on Alabaster’s edited beta; in case anyone is interested, I’ve posted the latest build (18), but this should be regarded as just an interim thing while I continue to work on a release candidate that can be sent around to testers.

Continue reading “Alabaster Interim Status Report (Release 18)”

Preparing a game for testing

Shamus Young has some interesting comments on parsing in IF and how he thinks it could be improved; Mike Rubin has a response. Partly this comes down to an argument in favor of juiciness in IF games, with some crowd-sourcing ideas for how to accomplish that juiciness. Eric Idema’s ifrotz project seems actually fairly relevant to all this, since it looks as though it might enable some of the things Shamus imagines, in terms of group testing.

This is all potentially valuable. It touches on only part of the quality-assurance problem, though, as this year’s comp crop reminded me. We tell authors to have their games tested thoroughly and to give themselves lots of time for the testing process (all of which is good advice), but in my experience it is difficult even for diligent testers to get a game up to an ideal state of polish if the author hasn’t done a certain amount of anticipation to start with.

Continue reading “Preparing a game for testing”